Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America. Sylviane A. Diouf. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 340 pp.

In July 1860, the schooner Clotilda carried to Mobile, Alabama, the last African slaves imported into the United States. Sylviane Diouf carefully reconstructs the experiences of the 110 captives from their origins in Dahomey to their life on the outskirts of Mobile. Half were women. Half were under fifteen years old. Through an impressive study combining a historian's analysis of archival and published sources with an anthropologist's fieldwork in Africa and Alabama, Diouf provides a narrative of the Clotilda Africans and an insightful discourse on race within the United States.

Diouf begins with a rich description of conditions along the Bight of Benin and in the American South. As sectional tensions heightened and as rising slave prices generated class fissures among white southerners, voices calling for resumption of the international slave trade, closed in the United States since 1808, grew louder. Illegal importation likely brought thousands into bondage each decade of the antebellum period, particularly through the Republic of Texas and along the Gulf Coast. The trade persisted through a combination, according to Diouf, of "Southern justice, Northern complicity, and Federal apathy" (p. 23). Nevertheless, a federal crackdown after the seizure of the Wanderer's over 200 captives in 1858 inspired Mobile slaveholder Timothy Meaher to import a shipment of Africans on principle. Involved in economic enterprises ranging from shipbuilding to cotton cultivation, Meaher arranged for Captain William Foster to sail to Dahomey. British efforts to foster palm oil production and wean the Dahomey economy from the profitable international slave trade in the early 1850s actually increased the domestic trade. By the late 1850s, King Ghezo, lured by Napolean III's "free immigrants" scheme in Martinique and Guadeloupe, the resurgence of the Cuban slave trade, and American slaveholders' smuggling efforts, openly resumed the trade. Diouf reminds readers of the international similarities of these slave societies, noting for instance how slaveholders used threats of sale – from being sold "down the river" in the United States to being sold overseas in Africa – to maintain stability. Furthermore, both African and European societies shared a sense of cultural superiority, considering the other ugly and cannibalistic.

Particularly striking is Diouf's revelation that the Clotilda Africans occupied an often overlooked racial middle ground in the United States. The Africans, arriving when only one percent of American slaves recalled an African ancestor, struggled against perceptions of their primitiveness. Naked as they stepped from the Clotilda (a practice meant to reduce filth during a voyage that averaged 45 days and on which temperatures below deck could reach 130°), they adapted clothing given by their masters into African garb, such as using shirts as baggy pants. Whites and African Americans frequently ridiculed the Clotilda Africans, many of whom bore symbols of seemingly barbaric traditions such as ritual scarring and filed teeth. With emancipation, the Africans – in a pattern similar to ethnic immigrants later in the century – pooled resources, bought land, and developed an enclave called African Town north of Mobile. Diouf meticulously scans conflictive evidence to identify the locations from which these slaves came. As Diouf demonstrates, local customs formed their ethnic identities and contributed to the creation of their new pan-ethnic identity in Alabama. Diouf astutely notes that the slave trade produced a "tragic succession of separations" that united – whether in the pens of Ouidah, the hold of a ship, or the Alabama plantations – diverse individuals facing uncertain futures (p. 58). These Africans "used their Africanity as a cement transcending cultural differences" even while "to outsiders, they were all the same, Africans, with the negative connotations the term often implied" (p. 156). African Town, for example, was surrounded by a fence with eight gates as traditionally appeared in towns from which most of them came. They replicated their homeland by selecting a community leader, judges, and laws. Here they created the first African community in the United States since the maroon colonies of the seventeenth century, a place that "was a black town on the surface and an ethnic one at its core" (p. 156). Suspicion of the Africans by neighboring blacks encouraged community cohesion. Yet "their very Africanity played in their favor" as whites and blacks perceived them as "'heathens,' savages, most likely cannibals, whose reactions one could not predict and should fear" (p. 101). Such trepidation in others was reinforced by the Africans' strong sense of community which allowed them on several occasions to usurp white supremacy and African American codes of conduct. Whites tread lightly around the "novel situation" of having a cohesive group of Africans in their midst (p. 101). Likewise, the Africans looked with suspicion on African Americans given African constructions of race which identified lighter skinned blacks with whites. The Africans, in turn, informed white officials of activities within surrounding black districts, thereby gaining valuable allies within white society.

Diouf's work skillfully blends established scholarship into her analysis, situating the Clotilda Africans in their transatlantic world. The story is one of cultural survival and transition. Members of the community enlisted in the Federal army during the Civil War, supported organizations seeking pensions for former slaves, sued railroads, and survived the convict-lease system. By the time Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor of the community, died in 1935, the Clotilda Africans had inspired numerous stories and even investigative visits by author Zora Neale Hurston, among others. Mobile absorbed African Town in 1948, yet numerous descendents remain, promoting their unique history. Although Diouf largely focuses on the Clotilda Africans, her study calls for more attention to these subsequent generations and their transformation into African Americans. African American perceptions of these Africans deserve more examination as well. Nevertheless, by restoring ethnicity to the discussion of black America, certainly a timely issue given the rise of Barrack Obama, Diouf provides a stimulating account not only of the last slaves to arrive in the United States but also of the meaning of race in America. Her book suggests numerous launching points for further research. In the meantime, Diouf's highly accessible study will certainly stimulate intense discussion among academics, students, and, hopefully, Americans in general.

Anthony J. Stanonis
Queen's University, Belfast